Sound

The “right” guitar tone is an elusive and personal thing, and many seasoned guitarists strive to achieve a particular tone that reflects their musical style or matches the genre in which they are playing. In response to this, Dialtone is set to launch its new guitar pickup aimed squarely at the musician who likes to adjust their sound on the fly. Claimed to be the world's first on-guitar version of an infinitely adjustable pickup, the Dialtone promises a lot of tone control without the need for further effects boxes or software control.
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In a world increasingly dominated by touchscreens, a London design studio is taking an approach to touch that's both low(er)-tech and innovative at the same time. Bare Conductive raised over US$200,000 on Kickstarter last year for an Arduino-based project called Touch Board that turns any conductive material into a potential capacitive touch input, including the firm's own conductive electric paint. Gizmag's Eric Mack was able to see the Touch Board in action and speak with co-founder Matt Johnson at the Bay Area Maker Faire.
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It's one thing to assemble a loudspeaker from 3D-printed components, but researchers at Disney have figured out a way to 3D print interactive loudspeakers in any shape imaginable, while also integrating speaker functionality into the whole object or just parts of it. Just envision 3D printing an entire loudspeaker in one step in the shape of Cinderella, and having sounds boom off her whole body or just her skirt.
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Metamaterials are already being used to create invisibility cloaks and "temporal cloaks," but now engineers from Duke University have turned metamaterials to the task of creating a 3D acoustic cloak. In the same way that invisibility cloaks use metamaterials to reroute light around an object, the acoustic cloaking device interacts with sound waves to make it appear as if the device and anything hidden beneath it isn't there.
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A floating sphere called Space Replay has been created that explores unusual sound signatures from transitional public spaces, moving around its space and replaying the sounds it picks up after a short delay.
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In January 2012 we first heard about Mogees, a small device created by Bruno Zamborlin for a PhD project in Arts and Computational Technologies. Two years later and, after going through some literal fine-tuning, Mogees has made it to Kickstarter. But just what is this strange device that promises to let you "Play the world"?
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A team of researchers at the University of Texas At Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering has effectively disproved the adage that, “if you can hear you can be heard” by creating the world's first one-way acoustic circulator. The simple, compact device, which controls the direction of sound waves, allows the user to hear without being heard.
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Before an adoring public can begin to appreciate your axe-wielding wizardry, the signal from your electric guitar will probably need to make its way down some copper cable to get to the Marshall stack. On the way, the tone of the guitar can get flavored, capacitance can cause frequency loss, and if you're really unlucky, the to and fro of nearby taxi conversations can add some unexpected color to a performance. The Light Lead from London's Iconic Sound promises the kind of signal clarity that many players might very well kill for. Claimed to be the world's first optical analog jack-to-jack guitar cable, it's touted to have zero capacitance, zero loading, electrical safety and a virtually infinite lifespan.
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From hiding hearing aids in your mouth to having them built-in to the arms of your glasses, we have seen some innovative efforts to assist those with hearing difficulties in recent years. With these unobtrusive technologies available, you might think that wearing a hearing aid around your neck would be the least desirable of options. Yet the team behind Wear believe that by favoring comfort and aesthetics over discretion, it may have conceived a viable alternative.
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